Obama Hits Romney Less in TV Ads Than Bush Pounded Kerry

By Greg Giroux -
May 21, 2012

In March 2004, as Massachusetts
Senator John Kerry emerged as the presumptive Democratic
presidential nominee, then-President George W. Bush was ready to
strike, dropping $40 million on ads that mostly attacked his
opponent on defense spending, terrorism and taxes.

Kerry’s negative ratings with voters rose to 37 percent in
mid-April from 26 percent in mid-February, according to Gallup
polls. Though the race remained close in head-to-head matchups,
the Democrat’s unfavorable ratings continued to climb and Bush
won November’s election in which he got 51 percent of the
popular vote to 48 percent for Kerry.

In the early stage of this year’s general election
campaign, President Barack Obama and his allies are taking a
different tack. They haven’t assailed presumptive Republican
nominee Mitt Romney with the same intensity, spending $4.5
million to run ads in March, April and early May, one-ninth of
Bush’s total during the same three-month period four years ago,
according to New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, an advertising
tracking firm.

While Obama intensified his ad campaign this month, the
spots tout his record as president more than they attack Romney,
the data shows.

“You don’t have anywhere near the scope of activity in
advertising that you had at this point in 2004,” even when
super-political action committees are considered in the count,
Anthony Corrado, a political scientist at Colby College in
Waterville, Maine, said in a telephone interview.

Defining the Opposition

In past re-election cycles, presidents used their financial
advantage to air television ads several months before the
election to create unfavorable and potentially indelible images
of their opponents in the minds of voters. The Bush-Cheney re-
election committee was following a strategy employed by
President Bill Clinton in 1996 as it became clear he would run
against Republican Senator Bob Dole of Kansas.

“This all becomes about defining the challenger. Bush
wasn’t going to move his numbers very much. Obama is not going
to move his numbers very much,” Ken Goldstein, president of
CMAG, said in a telephone interview.

The best timing for attacks on the challenger is “when
people’s opinions are less well-formed and the clay is softer.”

Katie Hogan, an Obama campaign spokeswoman, said in an e-
mail that the president is pouring more resources into person-
to-person voter contacts than in bombarding them with early TV
ads.

Building Grassroots Base

“We have built the largest grassroots campaign in history
because we know that a ground infrastructure will make the
difference in November, unlike our opponent who is relying on
undisclosed, special interest allies that are trying to buy the
election through negative ads,” she said, referring to super-
political action committees.

The Obama campaign’s most prominent ad targeting Romney
spotlights the closing of a steel plant that was bought by Bain
Capital LLC, the private-equity firm co-founded by the former
Massachusetts governor. The spot prompted some of the
president’s allies to suggest he eschew such attacks, with Cory
Booker, the Democratic mayor of Newark, New Jersey, on May 20
calling the debate “nauseating to the American public.” Obama
said yesterday the discussion is relevant because Romney’s “main
calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his
business experience.”

Flip-Flop Attack

Eight years ago, Bush’s campaign moved early to paint Kerry
as a flip-flopper who was weak on national security policy.

The most frequent ad of the 58,368 Bush aired between March
1 and May 10 said Kerry was “wrong on defense,” and showed
footage of him telling an audience that he voted for an early
version of an $87 billion spending bill for defense and
construction projects in Iraq “before I voted against it.”

“We spent early because we wanted to frame the race early
and characterize Kerry and his record before he did,” Mark McKinnon, a political consultant who advised Bush’s re-election
campaign, said in an e-mail.

“The early advertising put Kerry on his heels out of the
starting blocks and he never recovered,” McKinnon said.

Kerry Fought Back

Kerry also began his general election advertising early. He
paid for ads to run 40,887 times between March 1 and May 10, at
an estimated cost of $22.7 million, CMAG data show. The most
frequent spot Kerry aired during that time showed him promising
to create 10 million jobs as president and saying Bush’s
policies sent jobs overseas.

Kerry’s campaign was aided by The Media Fund, a now-defunct
tax-exempt political organization that spent more than $22
million to air ads 27,564 times during March, April and early
May of 2004. Its most-aired spots during that period attacked
Bush on health care and jobs. The assault helped keep the race
close, even though it didn’t prevent Bush’s anti-Kerry messages
from breaking through to voters, according to the polls.

That’s prompted some big donors to take a new approach to
this year’s election. A top donor to The Media Fund was
billionaire investor George Soros, who said this month that he
was giving $2 million to groups that focus on political
organizing and opposition research, not television advertising.

Outside Advertising

Outside groups with Democratic ties are less active on
television this year than they were in the early 2004, when they
were trying to help allies retake the White House rather than
hold it.

Eight years ago, the AFL-CIO ran two ads 7,441 times
between March 1 and May 10 attacking Bush’s record on jobs.
While the nation’s largest labor federation backs Obama’s re-
election, it hasn’t aired any ads yet in this year’s race.

Priorities USA Action, a super-PAC founded by former Obama
White House aides to promote the president’s re-election, spent
just $1.3 million on TV ads through May 14, CMAG data show. It
also paid $587,000 along with the League of Conservation Voters,
an environmental group, to air an anti-Romney ad in two states.

Priorities USA Action raised $10.6 million through April
and had $4.7 million in cash, according to its reports to the
Federal Election Commission. That’s far less than some
Republican super-PACs including American Crossroads, which had
more than $25 million in the bank at the start of this month.
Its non-profit arm, Crossroads GPS, which doesn’t disclose its
donors or fundraising totals to the FEC, announced last week a
$25 million ad campaign this week targeting Obama.

Though Obama and his Democratic allies haven’t hammered
Romney on television in the way that Bush attacked Kerry in
2004, that may change as more voters focus on the race and the
campaigns plot strategy for the summer and fall.

“I expect that we will see more advertising, and these
efforts ramping up, now that it’s the case that Romney has
emerged and we’ve moved into more of a general election
context,” Corrado said.